Platts 360 Visualisation

Visualising 3000 shipping routes

Commissioned by Brand Culture for Platts, an animated visualisation showing the journey of over 3000 ships created from five months of historical shipping data.

The visualisation was created for the Igloo 360 degree wrap-around projection system for display at the London Oil Forum at the Mayfair Hotel in London in 2017, using a bespoke app I created in Processing that allowed me to create 8000 x 1000 pixel videos that were then composited in Adobe Premiere for the final piece.

Probably my favourite parts of this project were the happy accidents that appeared as I started to play around visualising the data. Firstly there is no map displayed at any point. Instead the map of the world is creatad entirely by the small dots making up each of the ports around the world. Secondly, as I was working on a land avoidance system that the ships could follow, I created a kind of "crow flies" visualisation of various types of shipping routes, something that I thought the client wouldn't be into. As it turned out they loved these crow-flies interpretaions of their data, so much so that these graphics were used as the visual for the official invite to experience the visualisation during the oil forum event.

The work continues to be used at other events around the world as well as existing as a reworked, regular HD version for internal presentations.